Page 58 of Ace
But Savannah? By now, Roger Tanner would’ve come and gone. The dogs would be fed and walked, but eventually, they’d need more exercise. When Keller didn’t return like he’d said he would, she’d worry. She’d think he deserted her, that she wasn’t good enough. Which was so untrue.
The misconceived notion that she was somehow less than him tugged at the hollow spot in Keller’s chest. If anything, it was the other way around. She was the one who was happy with her life, even as meager as it seemed. But him? That was just another sad story not worth the telling.
Until Carol Marie came into his life, he never knew how much he craved feminine concern, care, and gentle affection. Or how badly he missed it after he lost her. Nor how much Savannah’s eternal optimism had buoyed him, lifted him… inspired him. Even now. It was as if she’d always been his missing half, more so because she seemed to have accepted that possibility easier and quicker than he had.
He could still recall the soft blue light in Carol Marie’s eyes. Blonde curly hair fluffed around her head like a halo. Keller was pretty sure she glowed from the inside out that day in high school. He’d noticed her plenty before he’d ever spoken with her. Even then, she’d started the conversation.
It was early fall. He’d never forget the unexpected cheerfulness of her first words to him, the place or the time. They were in the school library. He needed to return all the books he’d checked out before he left school that day. Despite being nineteen, he’d still been in eleventh grade. Held back for missing too much school, he was an underclassman, a pitiful junior. She was a rah-rah-rah senior, ahead of the game because of her AP classes and already accepted by some bigtime college out west.
Carol Marie was going places, while he was on his way out that day, never to return. He’d missed too much school. He would’ve been lucky to graduate with his class, but he couldn’t bear being held back. Not again.
Summer school wasn’t in the cards either. Elaine’s antics made regular attendance impossible, but school had always been Keller’s one safe place. He didn’t have to like the teachers who looked down their noses at him, but he’d always adored math and science. A kid could get lost in Algebra as quickly as American Lit. Or Robert Frost. Or Carol Marie’s pretty blue eyes.
‘Excuse me, sir, but could you reach that book for me, the one on the high shelf. See it? The one with agreen spine. It’s my book of Robert Frost poetry. Jamie Whitaker thinks it’s funny to put my things where I can’t reach them.’
She’d called him sir. The irony of anyone addressing him respectfully took his breath. By the time he’d stretched one arm way over her head and dragged her book off the top bookshelf, his lungs had closed off and his throat had gone sandpaper dry.
Jamie Whitaker was the class jerk, but Keller suspected he had a crush on Carol Marie like every other guy in high school, didn’t matter if they were freshman, seniors, or about to drop-out—like him. She was the prettiest girl, the one to be seen with.
But Keller was a loser, dressed in rags and hand-me-down pants, doing a favor for the school sweetheart, and having a heart attack while he did it. ‘Here you go,’ he’d told Carol Marie, making sure she had a good grip on her book before he let it go.
She had a good grip on him by then, too. Her tiny fingers fluttered light and soft on his callused, much larger hands. ‘You don’t say much, do you?’ she’d asked, her head cocked to one side like she was trying to figure him out.
He’d already figured her out. She was hands-off beautiful, but in a kind and gracious way. ‘Guess I don’t have much to say.’
‘Would you help me study?’
He’d nearly laughed out loud at her needing anything from a bastard son of a bitch like him, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Those gentle fingers on his hand seemed to pour something warm and shiny and goodinto his usually bleak existence. For the first time Keller could remember, he didn’t feel like the biggest dolt in school. He wasn’t just the voodoo priestess’s worthless son. Carol Marie made him feel like he was—more.
‘Um, sure. Yeah, I guess.’ Man, he’d sounded like an idiot back then. ‘What subject you need help studying?’
‘Robert Frost. I’m writing my term paper on his understanding of rural American life. Did you know he was published in England before America?’
‘Did you know I don’t read poetry too good?’
‘Did you know I’m not really asking?’ she asked, blinking those big blue eyes at him and sucking him into the tenderest trap of his life at that point.
Well, okay then. Instead of packing up his locker and moving on like he’d planned, Keller walked her home. The next day they put their heads together in study hall. They whispered, giggled, studied together, and he was a goner. The next day she took him shopping for clothes. He paid for everything they bought. It depleted his meager savings, but she told him he looked manly, and he believed her. The next day she asked him to take her to the homecoming dance. The next thing he knew, he’d graduated ahead of schedule—with her class.
Little did either of them know that was the beginning of the end. Elaine never wanted happiness for her son. She’d hated Carol Marie on sight. Yet Keller wasn’t yet man enough to know how to walk away from the best thing in his life, not when his pretty wife owned him, heart, body, and soul. Not when she was the one saving grace in life.
Yet that was exactly what he should’ve done. He should’ve told Carol Marie ‘no’ that first day in the library, that she shouldn’t be seen with lowlifes like him. She might still be alive then.
Ever his strongest ally, she was the only one who’d encouraged his need to enlist in the Army after they’d married. She knew the cost, but she loved him. She ran with him, swam with him, even drilled with him on the range preparing his endurance for the physical and marksmanship challenges ahead. Carol Marie was the one standing at his side the day he graduated basic training, not Elaine. After that he was headed for Camp Rogers in the Harmony Church area of Fort Benning, GA, for Ranger Assessment. Carol Marie and he had a bright future. Until he took leave two days later. Until Elaine finally relented to meet the new Mrs. Boniface. Until Carol Marie died…
“I let both of you down,” he told his dead wife and their unborn son. “I don’t even know where that graduation picture of us is any more.” Remorse crept over him like a sickness. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You have to know how much I love you. I always will. Both of you.”
Bumping the back of his head against the trailer wall behind him, Keller closed his eyes and wished for a bottled water and a way out of the dilemma with Savannah. That wasn’t love, and he damned well knew it. It couldn’t be. There was no sense fooling himself or her. They’d only met yesterday. Okay, so they were sexually compatible, and they seemed to like eachother. So what? Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was love. Lust maybe. There’d been plenty of that.
Yet even as he denied the notion, voracious need for Savannah’s tender sweetness warmed Keller’s body. He could be in bed with her luxuriously soft body draped over him right now. His nose could be buried in her hair, his hands full of her small, succulent breasts. Or her ass. He could be listening to her expound on some wise thing Gran Mere had said. He could be…Home.
But no. There was no home for him. Not anymore. He gave that up the day he buried his wife and child. This thing with Savannah had to stop before she ended up dead too.
A tiny wiggle in his pocket roused Keller from his dark thoughts. The hummingbird was alive—and kicking.
“If I let you go, I’ll never see you again,” he told the stiletto-nosed creature poking its way up and out of his pocket. For some reason, it sounded like he was really speaking to Savannah.
Carefully, he cupped his fingers, caging the determined explorer where it wouldn’t get away and get hurt. “Trust me, you’ll get lost in this big, dark container. When the door finally opens, out you’ll go, like a shot.”And I’ll miss you like I’ll miss Savannah.
